Always Innovating Touchbook to Support Android and Ubuntu and More.

Posted on 21 January 2010 by


To refresh your memory, the Touchbook is a ARM based device that has been released that has Linux installed on it.  It was their own version of Linux called AI OS.  However, today I noticed the Always Innovating site has been updated.

The Touch Book comes with an optimized home-made Linux-based OS. Guided by openness and wide support, we provide natively multi-OS boot on the device.

With a simple finger press at startup, the Touch Book will run either our AI OS, Ubuntu, or Android. Mer, Gentoo have also been adapted to the Touch Book.

Google Chrome OS and Maemo are on their way!

This is a interesting development!  Hopefully support of these other distros on the Touchbook will help it gain a little more mind share.  I still can’t wait to check one of these out!

Always Innovating Touchbook

This post was written by:

- who has written 491 posts on Gear Diary.

Joel is a system admin for a local college in Columbus, OH. While he loves Linux and tend to use it more than anything else, he will stoop to running closed source if it is the best tool for the job. His techno passions are Linux, Android, netbooks, GPS, podcasting and Personal Media Players.

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  • raygeeknyc

    Sadly, you should not waste your time [checking it out] – I was really enthusiastic and eagerly awaited my TB but it has proven to be, to put it bluntly, a sham. It’s more than useless – there’s no browser that supports such common reqs as gmail – youtube videos don’t play, there’s no IMAP client supplied, the UI is primitive at best. This almost a year after all of those enticing videos and pre-order pages on their website. They had a chance but could not deliver and now the market has caught up to them.

    They’ve had a series of embarrassments – from their many missed and retroactively adjusted ship dates, to a keyboard that belongs back in the 1990s, to their releasing a product that tipped over when opened to a usable viewing angle. Then there’s the “system update” feature that very few [by the forum and my own experience], if anyone, could ever get to work as advertised.

    Sorry guys, I really tried to believe that you could deliver something but I’ve got this piece of junk that cost me $400+ and I’ve spent perhaps 30 hours of my valuable time trying to make useful and like. Time to move along, nothing to see here.

  • Joel McLaughlin

    Have you tried the other distros??

    Youtube won’t play because this is running a ARM processor. Adobe will not provide a binary for ARM. Only X86. You may want to try Ubuntu which ships GNASH OR possibly try running Chromium which supports HTML5 and you can use the HTML5 version of youtube.

    Overall, thought, I still want to look at this thing. I think it’s a cool idea, but you have to temper it with what it is….it’s NOT a netbook. It’s more like a tablet.

    Granted, the Joojoo kicks this thing to the curb with a Intel Atom chip in it….if it ever ships!

  • raygeeknyc

    yes, I was really hopeful that the Android release would be useful – but it appears to be there just as a proof of concept – it boots and… well it boots =)

    I’ve been unable to get the Settings to pick up a network connection, applications don’t launch. The “Beta” label is being really kind.

    Re: Youtube – The Chromium installation supplied freezes constantly and doesn’t play videos either.

    Lastly – I know it’s not a netbook – but what’s a Tablet for? Can’t watch Videos, read email or reliably surf the web on this one?